> People are enamored with less accurate reproduction of vinyl records.

I just did a quick estimate and would say that there're around 300 vinyl records in my household, which I suppose is at the low end for people I know with a record player. A few years back, I owned one or two at most, and didn't have a functional player. That seems to have shifted similarly for a lot of people. You can buy the things new at such resolutely unhip outlets as Barnes & Noble, if you're so inclined.

I'll be pretty happy if vinyl settles into a role as the end-state consensus equilibrium of physical media for music, which is roughly what seems to be happening. Still-playable records encompass most of the era of recorded music, require no digital computation to play, and are substantial enough as artifacts to incentivize paying money for units of art. They're also physically attractive objects with attendant ritual protocols that are easily legible across every living generation.

Accuracy of reproduction is, above some baseline threshold, not the real concern here.

All of which, I guess, is just to say: You're probably right that this is unsurprising. There's a market. "Hipsters" is a convenient shorthand, but it's worth remembering that technologies usually have important properties which are lost to succeeding modes of tech, even when things like the appearance of film grain can in theory be easily reproduced by a filter or what have you. We use the new stuff and we forget the real dimensions of the old stuff.

You're right about the ritual, and the inherent limits caused by physical things (1s and 0s notwithstanding).

Digging a record out and dealing with a sound system is more work than opening up Spotify. You're also not already on your computer, surrounded by distractions. So, being invested in the process and having to make deliberate steps to engage in something else encourages people to focus more on the music and the experience.

Also, and this sentiment is probably a meme or something, but I feel that being able to take unlimited pictures has hurt casual photography. The extreme example here is people living through their phones, taking pictures of every bite of food, etc. A disposable camera really made me think about each picture I took (limited # photos, paying for the camera, have to go get them developed).

This. When putting on a record, I sit down to LISTEN. I am not putting it on to have some music in the background while I do other stuff. I listen.

Now, obviously I could listen just as well using Spotify, and on occasion I do - but to me, the whole ritual of bringing out an album, putting it on the turntable, brushing off the lint (if any), putting down the needle...

It all sets the stage. It gets me in the state of mind, if you like, where I can sit down and enjoy music at the fullest.

It is not because it sounds better (It doesn't, unless someone f---ed up the mastering).

It is not because of any inherent superiority of analog systems (they aren't).

It is because my stupid mind plays tricks on me and will not let me relax properly unless I put some effort into listening to the music.

Also agree fully on the 'advantage' of having limited exposures available - again, this is a problem of lacking self discipline, but I find when reviewing my photos that I have a significantly higher keeper ratio when shooting film; as I only get 38 (35mm) or eight (6x9) exposures on a roll of film, I tend to think a little bit more before pressing the shutter release - taking the couple of extra seconds to fine-tune the composition, make sure I haven't got too much clutter in the frame, etc, etc.

Again - if I were better at showing my mind who calls the shots, digital would be just as great. Problem is just I tend to go all Texan (no offense) with a digital camera - lots of shooting, sort out the good ones afterwards. Spend more time in front of a computer.

I sometimes take pictures of people speaking at events, and wow, I'm really glad to not be doing this on film. I might take 50 pictures to end up with one or two decent shots, that don't have the speaker's face in some grotesque contortion that I absolutely do not notice at all while just watching with my eyes...

Absolutely. Horses for courses, etc. (I mostly shoot things which don't act like that; architecture and landscapes, mostly.)

I bet a lot of sports photographers, too, were quite relieved when they could offload their F5s for something digital.

(The F5 being a beast, by the way - if memory serves, you could get 8 or even 9 fps out of it. A friggin' FILM camera. As if that wasn't enough, Nikon would be happy to sell you multiple F5s (each with its dedicated lens, of course) and an expensive thingamajig which let them shoot synchronously, but with an offset so that you'd get [n] times 8fps - though at a staggering cost.)

I love my F5. Closest I'll ever come to wielding a gatling gun.

My friends dad had a lot of jazz records when CDs came to market.

While an early adopter of CDs, he noted a lot of good recordings weren't being re-issued in the new format.

Hah. Hah.

Most people talking about "accurate" have no idea wtf they're talking about. I'm a musician, and I've produced records. At best, vinyl vs digital reproduction aren't "better" than one another, just different. But personally, I think vinyl can be more true to the music.

Start with dynamic range, since that's one of the spots where the "But it's more accurate!" people get it wrong. In theory, cd has far more dynamic range than vinyl. In practice, it has great deal less! This is a result of modern "loudness war" mastering. Most modern albums have less than 6db of actual dynamic range. Listen to something with more range than that, and it sounds flat and lifeless. Vinyl is usually mastered with significantly more dynamic range, but sounds more open and breathy - the way more dynamic range should sound.

And why is this? Because either way, most audio reproduction equipment is in no way able to reproduce the sound of instruments in an "accurate" way. You cannot shove the massive sound of a 100 watt Marshall stack through a pair of iPod earbuds, any more than you can look accurately at the Grand Canyon through a pinhole. So records are a miniature of a real sound. The entire recording, mixing, and mastering process is built around trying to capture the essence, the spirit of the original sound (or an ideal sound) in a way that can be reproduced on car stereos, cheap headphones, and the like. And the sound itself isn't exactly accurate, not on a record where the acoustic guitar is as loud as the drum kit!

Accuracy. Hah.

"In theory, cd has far more dynamic range than vinyl. In practice, it has great deal less! This is a result of modern "loudness war" mastering. Most modern albums have less than 6db of actual dynamic range. Listen to something with more range than that, and it sounds flat and lifeless. Vinyl is usually mastered with significantly more dynamic range, but sounds more open and breathy - the way more dynamic range should sound."

Garbage in, garbage out. What you're really saying is that good masters beat bad masters - nothing to do with vinyl at all. In the context of the larger discussion, this is disingenuous; the return of vinyl means that the new stuff will have the same "loudness war" problems that the digital stuff has. Unless you're claiming that artists are saving a super-duper special master just for their vinyl customers.

In a larger sense, this comment exemplifies the fallacy of gray[1]. Just because neither of them are perfectly accurate doesn't mean that CDs aren't more accurate.

[1] http://lesswrong.com/lw/mm/the_fallacy_of_gray/

To be absolutely clear here - I don't give two shits about "accurate". I care about reproducing the emotional content of the music. As a musician and a recording engineer, I take this stuff very seriously. I find the arguments for "accurate" to be utter nonsense 99% of the time, completely removed from the experience of music creation by people who have zero experience actually making music.

As for the fallacy of gray and the idea of loudness wars in vinyl mastering... nope. Two reasons. First, the loudness wars are a function of competitive reproduction on the radio or television. That competition doesn't really exist in the vinyl world, where listeners tend to listen to an entire album in a sitting. Second, it's not physically viable to make vinyl records much louder than they already are. High RMS volumes can make the needle jump the groove, or introduce a lot of downstream distortion (not the pretty kind).

Rather than fallacy of gray, this is more like saying you should eat with a bucket rather than a spoon because a bucket can hold larger bites. It doesn't matter if digital is technically "better" if there's no good way to take advantage of the additional benefits in can provide in practice.

(This all said, I'll record in digital rather than on tape, any day. The editing and management benefits are tremendous.)

I just complained about the post you're complaining about, but I'm also going to complain about yours.

There is actually a "super-duper special master just for vinyl" in many cases, with more dnamic range. The reason I've heard for that happening, though this could be wrong, is that the needle would be more likely to jump out of the groove with the loudness that CD masters are often getting. Whether that's true or not, the vinyl release often has a different, less compressed master. Some people rip the vinyl versions to digital for that reason.

Skipping is caused by high acceleration, so vinyl masters might use something called "acceleration limiting". The vinyl master might also mix the bass down to mono. So, in order to fix problems with needles jumping out of the groove, the solution is actually to apply more limiting and not less.

Vinyl has also been a production afterthought since about 1990. You'd create a stereo mixdown and send it to the mastering engineer--but by then it would often have some master bus compression already applied to it, equalization, and limiting. The mastering engineer would spend most of their time, day in and day out, working with music meant for CDs, and maybe they'd tweak the CD master a little bit to make it acceptable for vinyl. So, basically, by the time the loudness war started, people didn't care enough about vinyl to make a special vinyl master, and by the time the vinyl resurgence hit us, the loudness war was mostly over.

Hell, there's a ton of vinyl out there where they used the CD as a master, rather than using the original mixdown. The mastering engineer will cut a normal CD and send it to another mastering engineer which specializes in vinyl.

Of course, there are exceptions. There are records mastered separately for CD and vinyl, and there are artists who would deliver pristine mixdowns to the mastering engineers. But the vast majority of vinyl releases are not special. There are even plenty of cases where the vinyl master was butchered a bit compared to the CD.

I'm not trying to argue that CDs are better than vinyl in practice. I'm just arguing that there's not a technical reason to prefer vinyl, at least for most releases. If the difference you perceive is important to you, then the difference is real.

That's changing these days, as vinyl mastering becomes a forethought and not an afterthought, and cds are going the way of the dodo, in favor of compressed digital formats like mp3. Vinyl is selling well and is profitable. And it's not selling because people are pretentious hipsters who don't understand quality. It's selling because vinyl creates a better listening experience. People are getting back to listening to music other than as something to decorate their jogging.

The "better listening experience" is a tired argument, if you have a sentimental / emotional attachment to vinyl then the advantage is very real but for those of us not attached to the medium the listening experience is not better.

Vinyl may sell "well" but not if you compare it to other media, such as CDs. Even though CDs continue to collapse in popularity they still move 8x as many units as vinyl (and they're more durable, smaller, higher fidelity, etc). Albums instead are getting mastered for iTunes and Spotify, and that's had a much better effect on master quality than the vinyl resurgence.

I'm in audio too, and while what you say is true, it feels kind of like saying digital photography is worse than film if everyone's shooting with their exposure set five stops up. Then you can say "digital's clearly worse - look how blown out it all is!"

The loudness war is unfortunate, but a CD can be used properly to have plenty more dynamic range and plenty less noise than a record.

There are other benefits to analogue formats though, like soft clipping.

Well, yeah. But that's a different issue than the "accuracy" line that's brought up by dudes who don't play instruments and have never mixed a song (or alternately, have little experience at professional-level photography and couldn't tell you the three factors of exposure if you asked).

This same argument has been made forever in photography too. There's no hope for "accuracy". Even if you ignore the obvious facts like 2-dimensional representation and tiny form, even just the light itself is something that is at best interpreted artistically by the photographer.

Good photography is about producing a piece of art which represents and evokes a scene the photographer saw. Film is a tool for doing that and the entire process surrounding it influences the choices the photographer/developer/printer makes in their interpretation of the scene. Digital is just another tool and has it's own downsides (its own "loudness war" for that matter, too).

While I've used digital SLRs almost exclusively for about 12 years, there's still something I enjoy about using film. Maybe it is less accurate, but it's less accurate in what I find to be an aesthetically pleasing way.

That said, I am surprised that Kodak is bringing back Ektachrome. I find it hard to believe that there would be enough users to warrant this, from a business perspective. I guess we'll see what happens. (I personally prefer Fuji film anyway...)

Most color films aren't designed to capture accurate colors, they're designed to look good. Portra, Velvia, the various -chromes, etc. are all deliberately inaccurate.

What you like about film is the color grading that the emulsion engineers designed for you.

Film-emulating post-processing is getting there, but it's not there yet. Even with a good digital capture that keeps the highlight information, it's very difficult to get a good film look. It's more than just curves adjustments. I've played around with some software that tries to simulate the chemical development process, and that seems on the right track, but it's not there yet. I tend to think this would be a good application for ML if someone did the work to take side-by-side images with a given film and digital.

Perhaps a larger concern is the chemicals that are required to develop the stuff and making sure they are disposed of responsibly and not just flushed down the drain. There's more important reasons than "liking how it looks". I know people will disagree, but a skilled photoshopper can often reproduce the look and feel of film with digital. And certainly can do things film could never do. I believe it's a good trade-off

> Perhaps a larger concern is the chemicals that are required to develop the stuff and making sure they are disposed of responsibly and not just flushed down the drain.

The same argument can be made for the disposal of electronic devices, the half life of digital camera bodies seems to be far shorter than that of film camera bodies. I know of at least one photo project on the subject: http://www.bitrotproject.com/ and i'm sure there are others.

I think what has happened here, in reference to your original comment, is that the decline of film sales has reached its end state; that being it has stabilized. The fact that there are millions of film camera bodies floating around means there will, at least for the short to medium term (decades), be a market for film. Hipsters or otherwise.

> There's more important reasons than "liking how it looks". I know people will disagree, but a skilled photoshopper can often reproduce the look and feel of film with digital. And certainly can do things film could never do. I believe it's a good trade-off

I agree, but the film vs digital argument is always reduced to boring technicalities like resolution, sharpness, colour rendering, etc etc. The most important reasons to shoot one camera over another, or one medium over another, is that it will inform your approach and ultimately your results. If you're working on the long term, then that matters.

> I know people will disagree, but a skilled photoshopper can often reproduce the look and feel of film with digital.

But why go through the hassle of photoshopping when you can just get the image out of the camera the way you want it? This is especially the case where you're taking a lot of pictures. All of that photoshopping would be tedious.

And why is a more "accurate" photo superior? Like take any famous photo and ask yourself: If the photo showed even more detail would it be better?

The issue with film is that you can't get an image "out of the camera," it must be developed first. In order to get a usable image, you must know how to properly develop the film yourself, or pay one of the handful of competent remaining labs to develop it for you.

It's a much more sustainable process to throw a digital filter on your image.

>The issue with film is that you can't get an image "out of the camera," it must be developed first. In order to get a usable image, you must know how to properly develop the film yourself, or pay one of the handful of competent remaining labs to develop it for you.

To some degree I think this is part of the reason that film photograph has retained some appeal. There is no instant feedback, the process forces you to be more deliberate with each photograph, and the techniques to create images with film are becoming more arcane each year.

Like many other things that have been made easier by technology, there is often lasting interesting in the art of doing something by hand even if there is an easier/faster/more efficient way to get the same result. See Etsy:IKEA, craft beer:Budweiser, Digital:Vinyl music etc. I see film photography headed towards a similar niche.

>To some degree I think this is part of the reason that film photograph has retained some appeal. There is no instant feedback

Leica took this philosophy to extremes when introducing the M-D a while ago - a digital rangefinder camera with no preview screen. It's one of those Marmite things, apparently. If I wanted to shoot without instant feedback, I'd use a film M, thankyouverymuch - but obviously, YMMV.

> All of that photoshopping would be tedious.

If you want a film look on a batch of digital photos, you'd be wise to use one of the very capable batch processing programs.

Digital is going to beat analog for processing times, but the argument for which one is subjectively better is going to go around in circles forever. I still like and will enjoy working with both.

It's interesting how this parallels the arguments around realism in painting. Once you have a machine that can produce a more accurate representation of a scene, the degree of accuracy becomes an aesthetic decision.

This might pass in commercial work, but right now only the nicest of digital filters can capture the je-ne-sais-quois of analog. Everything else looks subpar to a trained eye.

Most of it is rather safe. Fixer is the bad part of the process IIRC.

Good luck buying a large format digital camera with a high quality sensor, it'll cost you an arm and a leg. Film cameras are super cheap, you can get 35mms for free on yard sales or Craigslist. Their lenses also. A high quality 50mm prime lens with an old mount is absurdly cheap compared to its modern equivalent used on digital cameras - you can even get high quality prime lenses for free if you're ok with manual focus.

For some mounts, 40-50 year old lenses still work. The breakdown isn't film/digital; it's manufacturers deciding to (or not to) retain backwards compatibility for forward flexibility.

Film isn't necessarily less accurate than digital capture, especially with film cameras that do automatic exposure and focus. Film uses chemical reactions to capture light, and digital uses electrical signals. Accuracy is based on how we map these to their true colours.

Digital would make sense to be more precise (not accurate) than film, though.

Film is automatically much worse any time you need higher sensitivity because of low light situations and can't use a tripod or need to capture a more mobile target. 400 iso film in 35mm format is noisier than any modern DSLR used in 3200+ iso settings, any, even entry-level $400 Canon or Nikon.

Also, in terms of level of details it has been possibly a decade since DSLR have become much better than 35mm film. Medium and large format film was still better for a longer amount of time, but medium format cameras are a lot more cumbersome and large format cameras are something only the most dedicated would ever bother to carry anywhere.

This is one of the smallest medium format camera for comparison : https://melbournestreetphotography.files.wordpress.com/2013/... And it's a rangefinder, so it's basically unusable with telephoto lenses. Mirror based medium format cameras like the Hasselblad were things that pretty much never left indoor studios.

Correction: 35mm is grainier, not noisier. After staring at grain vs color noise in shadows for hours at a time, the aesthetics of grain are one of the reasons I still shoot film sometimes.

This is somewhat of a good point, I like film's aesthetics too. But, grain and noise are two different inter-related things.

A digital full-frame sensor (vs 35mm film) at the same settings is going to have much less noise. I love film. But the fact is that silver vs cmos is a losing battle of technologies.

http://www.optics.rochester.edu/workgroups/cml/opt307/spr04/...

I take my Bronica ETRSi all over the place.

It depends if you are talking about detail or color accuracy. I shot medium format for years until digital just passed it by on both.

Ever used a manual typewriter? I've got a lovely West German Olympia I picked up used. Very authentic writing experience...how authentic? It actually hurts after enough effort.

If every keyboard took the same amount of effort as the typewriter, 80% of the internet chatter would be gone because of the amount of physicality involved.

An odd benefit of vinyl records is that they're harder to copy, especially if the listener actually wants vinyl. Thus, the choice to distribute on vinyl might be a way to generate a return on the cost of recording.

vinyl records can be copied easily (even mass produced) with silicone rubber and liquid plastic resin. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qdeWyBxL6Oc